Re: It's so tempting to shrug
Holiday's Trust Me, I'm Lying is a good overview, with many specific examples that Holiday was personally involved with, of how the 24-hour news cycle, "citizen journalism", and web-media economics have corrupted journalism.
It's tempting to say that news reporting has always been mostly rubbish, and point to "yellow journalism" and street rags and Early Modern broadsheets and all the rest. Holiday himself notes some of the historical parallels. But it's reasonable to argue that on the whole mainstream news reporting is much worse now than it was in, say, the 1980s, at least in the US.